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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (6698)	4/5/2004 6:13:52 PM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 15987

By coincidence, I spent a week in Yugolavia in 1990 on vacation. It was a beautiful country of forests and old roman ruins. The economy was suffering from severe hyper inflation and under the communist system the stores ran like a reverse auction. Goods were placed on the shelf at a certain markup (say 10%) and the store was considered to have made a profit if it sold the goods for that price. Each week the price went up from the inflation (perhaps double) but the store did not change the price of identical older merchandise. Customers would look through the shelf for the cheapest pricetag and bring that to the register. An item that had been on the shelf for a month or two may be priced a thousand times less than another identical item, often at an exchange price of pennies. The "auction" part was a matter of waiting for the real price to drop, while not waiting too long for another customer to snatch up the items. I got quite a collection of Croatian crystal that way. That economic breakdown was the first cause of the crisis that lead to the breakup. TP